Daily Search Forum Recap: November 27, 2020

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Search Buzz Video Recap: Google Ranking Fluctuations, Featured Snippets With Augmented Links, Google-Generated Web Stories Deindexed & New Crawl Stats
Although this is the Thanksgiving holiday week, it was not slow at all in terms of search news and changes. First, we had an unconfirmed Google search ranking update earlier this week…

Click Bots Won’t Improve Your Google Rankings
A post on Reddit asks what is stopping someone from building a bot to click on your Google search result listings, going to your site, spending some time there and sending Google positive click data. The truth is, no one is stopping you from doing this but it won’t help your Google rankings if you ask Google.

Google Local Suggest An Edit Placement Moved On Mobile
Google has moved the feature to “suggest an edit” from in the main mobile list view of a local listing to in the three vertical dots bar. So it is a bit harder to find now but it now takes up less space in the local panel.

Google Maps Tests Address Numbers On The Map
Google seems to be testing displaying address numbers in the Google Maps user interface. I personally cannot replicate this but Joy Hawkins was able to see it and shared a screen shot.

Google: We Can Still Rank A Page After Matching Content Is Removed
Let’s say your company name is Google and then after 17 years you decide to change your name to Alphabet – just a theoretical name change. So you remove Google from all your home page and change it to Alphabet. Did you know that the home page can still rank for the word [Google] even if you removed that from your page?

Some Google AdSense Publishers Receive Multiple Payments/Deposits
There are reports of some Google AdSense publishers receiving more than one deposit or payment from Google this month. In fact, I received a few myself, and I am not exactly sure why. The payments report shows weird cancelled earnings and rebilled earnings, with backup withholdings and so forth.

Google’s Martin Splitt Gets A Trim
Martin Splitt of Google, who is known for his somewhat wild hair styles, has decided to go with a new hairdo. The new hairstyle is, um, ordinary. No more color, not long, just very corporate. Martin

Google’s Socially Distant Thanksgiving Day Logo: History of Thanksgiving
Google has a socially distant Thanksgiving Doodle, logo, up on its home page in the US today. You can see the “furry and feathered friends” talking over a tin can with string telephone from branch to branch. Yahoo also has a turkey logo and Bing has a Thanksgiving themed background.

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

UPDATE: This is a technical issue and team are working on fix, Tim Capper on Twitter
We’ll crawl with the mobile crawler & use what your site shows us there. If a URL has less content when a mobile user comes, that’s what we’ll use. If a page is "just" hard to read on mobile (zoom, pan, etc), John Mueller on Twitter
Automatic image improvements now available with Buy on Google, Google Merchant Center Help
If you mean you can go (back?) to making content that users don’t care about, … You might be disappointed 🙂, John Mueller on Twitter
We just don’t crawl or index all content on the web. That’s normal. A good way to encourage search engines to care is to make sure that they’re missing out by not having it indexed. Make totally awesome, unique,, John Mueller on Twitter

Search Engine Land Stories:

The problem with the ‘structured content’ mindset

UrbanObserver

Advertising

Movies

TV Shows

Music

Celebrity

Scandals

Drama

Lifestyle

Health

Technology

Company